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Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Hyperconverged Systems Revenue will Reach $5 Billion

Enterprise IT infrastructure investment is now more software-defined within the typical data center. The market for hyper-converged integrated systems (HCIS) will grow 79 percent to reach almost $2 billion during 2016, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

HCIS will be the fastest-growing segment of the overall market for integrated systems, reaching almost $5 billion by 2019. Although the overall integrated systems market is growing, other segments of this emerging market will likely experience cannibalization from hyperconverged systems.

"The integrated systems market is starting to mature, with more users upgrading and extending their initial deployments. We are on the cusp of a third phase of integrated systems," said Andrew Butler, vice president at Gartner. "This evolution presents IT infrastructure and operations leaders with a framework to evolve their implementations and architectures."

Phase 1 was the peak period of blade systems (2005 to 2015), Phase 2 marked the arrival of converged infrastructures and the advent of HCIS for specific use cases (2010 to 2020), and Phase 3 now represents continuous application and microservices delivery on HCIS platforms (2016 to 2025).

The third phase of integrated systems will deliver dynamic, composable and fabric-based IT infrastructures by also offering modular and disaggregated hardware building blocks, driving continuous application delivery and continuous economic optimization.

Hyperconverged Systems Applications

Despite high market growth rates, HCIS use cases have so far been limited, causing silos with existing IT infrastructure, according to the Gartner assessment. Its progression will be dependent upon multiple hardware and software advances, such as networking and software-defined enterprises.

Ultimately, the underlying infrastructure will disappear to become a malleable utility under the control of software intelligence and automated to enable cloud-based IT as a service (ITaaS) to the business, developer and operations (DevOps) communities.

"HCIS is not a destination, but an evolutionary journey," said Mr. Butler. "While we fully expect the use cases to embrace mission-critical applications in the future, current implementations could still pose constraints on rapid growth toward the end of the decade."